Thursday, March 21, 2013

And Another Thing

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Bill O’Reilly ever talk to anyone. At them, yes, but to them, no. As far as I can tell, his schtick is to talk faster than the person who’s sitting across from him. His technique is to only air his viewpoint and leave his guest sitting there bemused. It works, I guess, he has lots of followers, ones that can’t think very fast themselves.

I saw a clip of O’Reilly sitting down with Richard Dawkins who manfully tried to provide half of the conversation but was never allowed to do so by the O-Master. Needless-to-say, O’Reilly neatly defended his faith and demolished Dawkins in the process. Or so he thought. That Dawkins couldn’t get a word in edgewise didn’t matter.

When Dawkins was able to assert that O’Reilly was an atheist as far as anyone else’s god was concerned, O’Reilly tossed it off with, “I just saw Jupiter and he didn’t look so well.” That was a riposte?

His defense, other than the classic “He’s proved his existence to me, and that’s all that matters,” of Christianity was the equally lame, “Christ was a real person.”

Ergo, he was a real god? How does that follow?

Not to mention that he’s fallen into the trap of thinking his god is real while all the others aren’t. Well, of course, that’s the definition of belief, not a defense of it. Bill, evidently, doesn’t know the difference. Nor, apparently, does he realize that all gods are myths, regardless of upon whom the myth is hung. Call me a god, Bill, but it won’t make me one.

Little Known Fact:

Claiming a personal experience with god as proof of his (usually a “his”) existence is the equivalent of saying that there’s proof of aliens because you’ve been taken up to one of their spacecrafts and been probed. Lucky you. But if you get 5000 people in a room claiming they’ve all had a personal experience with god and that they’ve been probed, the odds of their being correct don’t go up a whit. Infinity doesn’t allow such odds to get to zero, but they can get pretty damn close.